Context Navigation

Setting up a Raspberry Pi for Fawkes

This document describes how to get a ​Raspberry Pi (raspi) board up and running for use with Fawkes. We will go with the Fedora ARM Remix installation, as we use that system on the other robot and desktop machines as well. We recommend to use an 8GB or larger SD card.

Raspberry Pi Installation - Laptop

We chose to go with the easy route through the graphical installer ​Fedora ARM Installer, but you can choose any installation method, for example the ones described on the ​Fedora Raspberry Pi wiki page. The catch with the graphical installer is that it must be run with the English locale. If you use a different default locale, for example German, run the installer with (on your laptop/desktop):

LANG=C fedora-arm-installer

Update the list of images, choose the SD card device (unmount the drive if it was automatically mounted on insertion), and start the writing process. Then you are done.

Raspberry Pi Installation - On the raspi

The following installation instructions are meant to be executed on the raspi. After writing the image to the SD card plug the card into the raspi and connect it to Ethernet and power. The raspi will automatically get an IP address via DHCP if such service is provided. All the following instructions assume that you have found a way to know the IP (query the router/DHCP server or guess) and logged in as root using ssh root@the-ip-you-found. The initial password is raspberrypi.

First Boot Setup

If you plug a screen, keyboard, and mouse, or if you connect using VNC to the first boot screen you can do several of the steps mentioned later over the graphical first time setup guide, i.e. resizing the root file system, setting up the time zone, or configuring the graphical output. Confer the setting up VNC below to use the VNC method. If you choose to use the graphical setup you can skip the following manual steps.

Installing a VNC Server

There are two methods to setup the VNC server. First, you can run a VNC server manually each time you want to use it. This method is required to connect to the first boot screen. The second method adds a module loaded by the X server so that VNC is enabled each time the graphical screen starts.

For either method first install the required packages using

yum install tigervnc-server tigervnc-server-module

Manual VNC Server

Login as root. Check which display the X server is using by issuing

ps ax | grep Xorg

You will get a line where the commands starts with something like /usr/bin/Xorg :0. The ":0" shows you the display number. For first boot it will most likely be ":9". Then create a password and run the VNC server with

The VNC server will be active after the next restart of the X server. In doubt just reboot. Do this only after first boot has been completed initially.

Resizing the Root Partition

The default image comes for a 2GB SD card, while you typically will want to use a larger disk. Hence the root partition must be resized. For this we will need to erase the partition and create a new one that starts exactly at the same position, but spans the free space. Afterwards need to reboot and to (on-line) resize the file system. Now step by step: